Journalism has never been free of propaganda. News has always been produced and marketed like any other commodity, satisfying and shaping consumers’ opinions, loyalties and taste. Over the last thirty years, the US elites and their allies have effectively eliminated conventional journalism in favor of propaganda and counter-propaganda serving their relentless war on the majority world. Integral to that war in recent years has been the purposeful manipulation of social media so as to usurp and compromise any remnants of orthodox news reporting.

But these are only two components of the Western elites’ malevolent abuse of information and communications resources. Perhaps they are not even the most important. Ever-more-tawdry corruption of academic research; systematic corporate and government co-option of non governmental organizations; cynical abuse of fundamental norms in international legal and human rights institutions : these and others are all interconnected, fundamental components of the West’s war on humanity.